Bret van den Brink

“All sin was of my sinning, all
Atoning mine, and mine the gall
Of all regret. Mine was the weight
Of every brooded wrong, the hate
That stood behind each envious thrust,
Mine every greed, mine every lust.”

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Renascence”

“In that same way that, upon earth, [Christ] was in solidarity with the living, so, in the tomb, he is in solidarity with the dead.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale

“The whole world order—and within it the whole of aesthetics depends on the inextricable linkage of Christ and Mary: on the interweaving, by grace, of the human act of assent into the redeemer's own act of assent, which is one with the assent of the love of the Trinity.”

HUvB

“God … sees in us the true beauty, because by his looking he sets within us his beauty.”

—Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord III

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

—George MacDonald, Lilith

—Aidan Nichols, Balthasar for Thomists (The quoted bit is Balthasar, I believe.)

“Where absolute love is concerned, conceiving and letting-be are just as essential as giving. In fact, without this receptive letting be and all it involves— gratitude for the gift of oneself and a turning in love toward the Giver—the giving itself is impossible.”

The word translated "hospitality" in the NT is philoxenia, which is a combination of two words: love (phileo) and the word for stranger (xenos).

Worldly thinking: "xenophobia" = fear/hatred of the stranger or foreigner.

Kingdom thinking: "philoxenia" = love of strangers; hospitality

“Mortals that would follow me,
Love vertue, she alone is free,
She can teach ye how to clime
Higher then the Spheary chime;
Or if Vertue feeble were,
Heav'n it self would stoop to her.”

“Sabrina fair
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassie, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of Lillies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,
Listen for dear honours sake,
Goddess of the silver lake,
Listen and save.”

“What, have you let the false enchanter scape?
O ye mistook, ye should have snatcht his wand
And bound him fast; without his rod revers't,
And backward mutters of dissevering power,
We cannot free the Lady that sits here
In stony fetters fixt and motionless.”

“Fool do not boast,
Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde
With all thy charms, although this corporal rinde
Thou haste immanacl'd, while Heav'n sees good.”

“Within the navil of this hideous Wood,
Immur'd in cypress shades a Sorcerer dwels
Of Bacchus, and of Circe born, great Comus,
Deep skill'd in all his mothers witcheries,
And here to every thirsty wanderer,
By sly enticement gives his banefull cup,
With many murmurs mixt.”

“I saw them under a green mantling vine
That crawls along the side of yon small hill,
Plucking ripe clusters from the tender shoots,
Their port was more then human, as they stood;
I took it for a faëry vision
Of som gay creatures…
That in the colours of the Rainbow live.”

“Shepherd I take thy word,
And trust thy honest offer'd courtesie,
Which oft is sooner found in lowly sheds
With smoaky rafters, then in tapstry Halls
And Courts of Princes, where it first was nam'd,
And yet is most pretended.”

“We that are of purer fire
Imitate the Starry Quire,
Who in their nightly watchfull Sphears,
Lead in swift round the Months and Years.”

Want to ease yourself into John Milton’s poetry before tackling Paradise Lost? Try Comus! A 🧵

Emily Dickinson on the
Transcendentals Beauty, Truth, and One:

Love a catchy title.

www.radixmagazine.com/2023/08/04/t...

“Yes! 'wish-fulfilment dreams' we spin to cheat
our timid hearts and ugly Fact defeat!
Whence came the wish, and whence the power to dream,
or some things fair and others ugly deem?”

—J.R.R. Tolkien, “Mythopoeia”

“It is my life to die, like glass, by light:
Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.”

—Thomas Merton, “The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared To A Window”

allpoetry.com/The-Blessed-...

“Yet such a sapphire-shot,
Charged, steepèd sky will not
Stain light. Yea, mark you this:
It does no prejudice.
The glass-blue days are those
When every colour glows,
Each shape and shadow shows.
Blue be it.”

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

“The words were spoken as if there was no book.”

—Wallace Stevens

“No ear
But eyes themselves were all the hearers there,
And every stone, and every star a tongue,
And every gale of wind a curious song.
The Heavens were an oracle, and spake
Divinity: the Earth did undertake
The office of a priest.”

—Thomas Traherne, “Dumbness”

“No business serious seemed but one; no work
But one was found; and that did in me lurk.
D’ye ask me what? It was with clearer eyes
To see all creatures full of Deities;
Especially one’s self: And to admire
The satisfaction of all true desire.”

—Thomas Traherne, “Dumbness”

This gave me a flashback to the children’s book Grim Tuesday, featuring a sentient eyebrow.

“Poetry must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.”

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Jotted down a sonnet inspired by Emerson’s praise of Montaigne’s Essays: “Cut these words, and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.”

#poetry #poem #sonnet